[Anne, after nearly 60 years, is aboard a boat back to England. She’s talking with an elderly gentleman enroute and they’re swapping stories about their lives.]

He asked: “Were you happy there? There in the mountains?”

She was taken aback. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by happiness. I’ve known moments of ecstasy. There were many, many joys. There were years of desolation and blindness. Years when I prayed to die. But life doesn’t let you do that, you know.”

“I know.”

“Life always asks us to forgive in the places where we’ve been most hurt.”

“Most abandoned?”

“That too. Just when you think it’s over, when there’s no hope, there’s some great surprise. There’s always more. And then you realize that we humans understand practically nothing about all this. All this we live in–as if it were ordinary.”

“Nothing is ordinary.”

“Yes,” she said, and fell silent.

“You were happy then?”

“Yes. I was happy. But not with the kind of happiness most people want. It went much, much deeper. I can’t describe it. It was the feeling that just grew and grew over the years, a current underneath everything, a feeling, a form, a hand that was on my life. A sort of fierce, fatherly love that demanded everything from me but hid itself from me. It had given everything. It wanted total trust in return.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s strange.”

“Like always being alone, but not alone?”

“The feeling was abandonment. It was emptying. No strength. No power.”

“You seem to have survived in good condition, for all that,” he said.

“It made me stronger. I gave everything, you see.”

“When everything’s given, nothing is lacking.”

“But not in the way we want.”

“Right. Not in the way we want.”

“Not in the style to which we would like to grow accustomed.”

“Precisely, Madam.”

“Later, after the worst of it, you begin to understand that you’ve survived. You grow old and you find yourself able to take a walk with a stranger and sojourner and speak with him of the sea.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 3, Chapter 34

[Nathanael and Stephen, grandson and grandfather, are talking about Jonah MacPhale, a cheating townsman.]

Stephen: “I’ve told Jonah MacPhale to his face many a time what I think of his practices. It’s like water running off a loon’s back. He just laughs and calls me a good old mick. But I don’t believe you can give up on people, write them off, you know, like so many do.”

[Then Stephen tells a story about the fighting when he was a young man in Ireland.]

Nathanael: “But it was war. Ireland and England were–”

“War? Oh, yes. Men are always at war with one another. But it doesn’t make it right. You see, when I looked down at that face as they were carrying him off the mountain, I saw something that scarred me for the rest of my days. His head was all busted, but I saw.”

“What, Grandpa? What did you see?”

“I saw my own face.”

“Huh?”

“I looked at his broken face, and it was my face. Do you understand, lad?”

“No.”

“I pray you’ll never have to.”

They sat side by side, unable to move.

“All my life, I’ve despised Jonah MacPhale,” said the old man. “But you see, I was wrong. Each of us chooses one form of betrayal or another. Some betray people. Some betray truth. We kill or steal or twist things up with a gun or a word, and all because we’re frightened little creatures. I can’t abandon Jonah to his fate. He is me, if you can understand, boy. And someone has to be there if his soul ever opens up long enough to ask why or cry for help.”

“You’re too good, Grandpa. He’s a rotten, corrupt sort of person.”

“I’m not good. And it may be he’s not yet doomed.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 3, Chapter 32

[Anne’s sister Emily came to visit from England. They’re catching up after twenty years of living in separate countries.]

Emily: “When I left the Party I was an empty shell. Then I met a good man, and he loved me. His love healed me. And that taught me everything. It’s why, I think, Anne, that the world can only be saved person by person, one by one. It’s the slow way but the true one.”

“You must miss Colin very much.”

“Yes, very much.”

She faced Anne, touching her own heart. “But you see, I have him here, always.”

Anne looked up at the mountain.

“I too have a good man. He loves me, my husband. But I’m not healed. Can you tell me why?”

“I don’t know why. But I know this: the healing begins when you abandon your demands for love and choose instead to give love, no matter what the cost. Madness, isn’t it? But a madness that works.”

“Perhaps for some, Emily.”

“No. For everyone. But first you have to forgive. Can you forgive Stephen for failing to love you as you wish?”

~ from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 20

[Anne and Edwin, the priest, are talking.]

Edwin: “I could have been the forerunner, even better than your garden variety rebel, a father of the revolution! Pretty intoxicating stuff, and I almost fell for it. In fact, I did fall for it. But it cost a ruined life to pay for my eyes to be opened.”

“Good heavens, have you killed someone?”

“No. Nothing so uncivilized as that. I…well, one can kill the thing one loves in a thousand ways. You can be on fire with passion for its beauty and ignore the hidden truths of a being, a soul. You can do all kinds of permanent damage thinking you’re making a beautiful creation, a free relationship.”

[Later, talking about his living at a subsistence level:]

“The little scraps that are left cover my food and firewood, and there are a few coins in the collection basket on Sundays. In Vancouver I was comfortable, respectably employed, influential…and quite wretched. [Here] I’m poor, but there’s a curious joy in this poverty.”

“Is this not,” Anne said carefully, pausing, “is this not just, perhaps, another romantic dream, this heroic poverty of yours?”

He laughed.

“Romantic? Nope, it ain’t romantic! It’s reality, and most of us don’t like much reality. Exotic images, impressions, good feelings, and above all, the illusion of being in charge, that’s what attracts us. Poverty is helplessness, vulnerability. You discover you aren’t God. You learn to live with certain kinds of pain that won’t go away.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 18

[Anne] no longer wished to be a person of quality, if by that word was meant a view from immense height upon an inferior humanity. Perhaps she would never cease to be an elitist, she thought, but it would be an elite of the merciful, the lovers of song and story, of children, of beauty, and of truth.

Precisely how that was to be defined and, further, how it was to be transmitted to her children was another matter. There was the immediate question of Ashley and that mind of his, so hungry for ideas. She knew that the fields and forest would teach him a wisdom that no city child could possess. But there was more to life, and she was determined to winnow it out for him. She saved her egg money and ordered volumes of books…

“Mama,” he laughed, looking up from [Gulliver’s Travels] “did you know there are people who start wars over whether you should cut your egg at the top end or the bottom end?”

“Yes, Ashley, I did know,” she smiled.

When he was twelve it The Scottish Chiefs. When he was thirteen and beginning to ask difficult questions about intangible things, she bestowed a copy of Les Miserables.

“Mum,” he said with a voice that was leaving childhood behind, “d’you think there are actually people who hate just for the sake of hating?”

“Yes. I do. I’ve met them. But the point is, Ashley, they don’t realize it. They think they’re improving the world.”

“I find that kind of hard to believe.”

“You will meet many such people in your life. They are sad and tragic. You would do well to avoid them at all costs.”

Stephen [the man] looked up from his old Irish poetry book and said, “There’s another way.”

“What way?” said the boy and the woman in unison.

“Treat them with mercy, but never let them have any power over your heart.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 2